2009 THE SHOP / VITAMIN CREATIVE SPACE
Installation views, No Dream
Solo show, The Shop / Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing
August 2009
No Dream, 2009
Fabric and thread
5 curtains, dimensions variable
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
No Dream consists in the installation of a group of fabric panels, which have embroidered drawings based on the work of modernist Argentinean artist Raul Lozza. They will re-configure The Shop and will become a new display: a selection of works by local artists will be installed in and around No Dream aiming to create a dialogue between the different works. Following The Shop’s conceptual framework as a space in search of the art object and the gallery as possible situations and expressions of daily processes these wall curtains will be movable, which will allow – if wanted – an almost daily transformation of space, of encounters, of interpretations. Made with the same material as a curtain and used to divide, their domestic usability both re-signifies and undermines their existence.
To bring Latin American Modernism, a time and place, into The Shop may look at first as distanced or misplaced yet my interest in this historical review is based on the possibility of finding possible connections between this specific history with The Shop’s context and intentions. One key element in Lozza’s work was the utopian idea of creating a painting system that would merge art, architecture, and design, therefore creating a single and unifying art piece. A painting was no longer “a window” yet an object, and hopefully an object of daily use. For this, his final goal was to paint directly onto the walls. In this aspect, the project intends to be also a research platform, for me as well as for the public.
This exhibition aims to become an experiment, with no fixed opening or closing date these “wall curtains” will dialogue with space as well as with The Shop as an identity as well as with other artist’s art-works as well with the viewer that encounters and enters The Shop. They will become a tool to be used by The Shop. A talk and video screening will be organized for which the curtains will be used as a display and as a background. No Dream’s intention is to create an open artwork, a functional dream, incomplete by nature.
“The perceptive painting is not a museum art, a place where a man goes, on a fixed schedule, in search of his ration of aesthetic feelings. It is an art of “ambiance” that must accompany man in his center of daily life; at home, in the public and private buildings, on means of transportation, in the offices, workshops and streets, because it must reach man in the expression of his reality and not at the exhaust pipe that is the exhibition room of a museum”. Art Critic Abraham Haber on the work of Raul Lozza.